I had planned another post about the front of campus for tonight but it’s a little complicated and I’m not quite ready so it must wait until Monday. (I’m just as disappointed as you are.) In the meantime I do have some pictures of students digging a hole in the engineering quad sometime in the 1980s (I think):

What you see here is the condensed version, by the way. There are over twenty shots of this digging episode so it must have meant something even though I admit it doesn’t look like it. Any information is welcome.

6 Responses to Engineers Digging a Hole, circa mid-1980s

I would hazard a guess that it could have something to do with 45 90 180. I don’t see any signs of the sculpture, so even if it doesn’t have to do with the installation, it would help date the pictures.

In a couple of photos, the woman is carrying a surveyor’s tape, so I’m agreeing with Matt about a civil engineering exercise. There are probably twenty photos because the photographer kept shooting looking for a good one. Notice the different buildings in the background, that means the photographer was moving around the group to get a good angle.

These are indeed civil engineers taking a deep soil sample. This must be the ’80s, because I did this around 1977 and we did it all by hand, no help from that gas powered drill I see being used in the last picture! The pictures are not in chronological order. On the leading end is a screw device around the perimeter of a hollow tube. They are screwing in a multi-piece pier, using that handle in the third picture to turn it around and around and around. When the handle gets about knee high, they unscrew the whole thing out of the ground, and slide the core sample out of the tube. Then they take off the handle, add another pier length, re-attach the handle and keep going, 15-20 feet of soil samples. It gives you a profile of the layers of clay, gumbo, sand, etc, all the way to the bottom.